


Dear Diary

by soyforramen



Category: Archie Comics, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: au of season 1, jason blossom is the villian in this one, tw: mentions of murder, tw: mentions of rape, tw: mentions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 08:00:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18890485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soyforramen/pseuds/soyforramen
Summary: On a cold winter day, Jughead finds Betty's diary.  Unable to contain his curiosity, he realizes everyone has Betty Cooper all wrong.





	Dear Diary

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a long lost prompt that went wildly darker than intended:
> 
> 'Jughead is used to feeling invisible to Betty whenever Archie is around. Ask anyone with a pair of eyes, and they'll tell you that sweet Betty Cooper has a crush on the boy next door. But when Jughead accidentally reads Betty's diary, he discovers that maybe everyone has got it all wrong.'

Jughead hadn’t meant to read her diary, really. It had just been there as if waiting for him. Wedged between the bed frame and mattress it kept stealing glances at him long after he’d promised himself he wouldn't snoop.

Minor crush aside, he really didn’t mean to pry. If things had gone his way, if he hadn’t been cursed with the last name Jones, he’d never have come to the Cooper home in the first place. But temperatures had dropped well below freezing, a record low for this time of year, and the Coopers just happened to be out of town for the long Thanksgiving weekend. And since the drive-in was little more than a lean-to shack, and because he knew that if Betty knew he was out of options she’d be the first to offer him shelter for the weekend, he'd helped himself to the Cooper hospitality he'd never before been offered. The fact that the Coopers had forgotten to turn their thermostat below the cozy 68 degrees Fahrenheit as suggested by the US Department of Energy was practically a golden invitation to lost souls like himself.

Besides, it wasn’t as if he’d gone to her house, or more correctly broken in through the basement, to spy on Betty. No, his intentions were purely out of self-preservation and a decided refusal to spend the next week alternating between cursing the chill an old moth eaten blanket couldn’t keep out and Pop’s concerned gaze. Especially since there was a house sitting alone and unattended. After all, someone had to make sure the pipes didn’t burst.

And he didn’t want to end up on the front page of _The Register_ like Moose and Chuck had. Or rather, like how their corpses had.

So when he’d fallen to the floor that Saturday morning it was a surprise when something else fell to the ground next to him. His head reeling with images of monstrous snakes with dripping fangs, it took Jughead more than a few seconds to realize the small black rectangle laying calmly next to him was a book. Still half-asleep he’d assumed it was just another book lost to time and space. Betty was, after all, prone to falling asleep while reading and it was easy enough to assume it had fallen through the cracks and forgotten. 

Unable to contain his curiosity, Jughead picked the book up and turned it over in his hands. It was a simple, unadorned journal. No design on the cover, no words on its spine. The mystery of it compelled him to flip through to a random page. It was covered in neat cursive, and a note in the margins caught his attention. He turned the book on it sides to better read it. Nothing more than a note in the margins about cleaning blood from fabric that made him slam the book shut as heat flushed to his face. He had a mother, who’d long since given him the talk, and a sister going through puberty. He knew exactly what Betty meant and he didn’t feel comfortable prying into that particular area.

Especially since it was one more reminder that they weren’t kids anymore and that Betty had grown into a young woman, something Jughead was already too aware of. He’d been aware of it ever since she’d all but blackmailed him into joining the Blue & Gold and brought the color back into his bleak life. 

The situation was all the cliched moments of every 80’s and 90’s rom-com come to life in their sleepy town. The loner kid starts noticing the girl next door only to find she was already over the moon for the handsome, All-American jock. In a perfect circle of cliches, the only one who hadn’t noticed Betty’s swooning was Archie himself. In this world, Archie was Jack Walsh. And Jughead was forever the Duckie to Betty’s Andie.

And everyone knew Duckie never got the girl.

Not wanting to wallow that deep in self-pity this early in the morning, Jughead shoved the book back where he thought it came from and made his way downstairs, laptop in hand. His phone greeted him with a peppy chirp as he entered the kitchen. When he saw he had a missed text from Betty all the moisture from his mouth fled to his palms. Did she know he was here? Did he miss a nanny cam somewhere and now Alice Cooper was ready to string him up in the town square?

He scrubbed his hands on his jeans and unlocked his phone.

_‘Snowed in at the grandparents! No wifi and barely any signal!’_

Jughead let out a long sigh. Despite the initial rush of fear, he was still comforted that Betty had thought to text him. He sent back a quick message about the wifi at Pop’s working well without its usual customers and set about making cereal and coffee. As the coffee percolated the diary crept back into his mind. What sort of secrets did it hold? What kind of thoughts did Betty risk putting down on paper in defiance of the ever-present danger of Alice Cooper? Was it strictly a journal, or did she go deeper into the workings of her social life? Was -

He shook the thought from his head and pulled out a mug from the cabinet. It wouldn’t do him any good to think about it. This was Betty’s diary and she was already doing him a huge, albeit unknown, favor by opening her house to him. The last thing Jughead wanted to do was to breach even more of her privacy.

Never before had he read Betty’s writing without her permission.

Never before did he want to.

The rest of the day Jughead did everything he could to avoid even thinking about the damned thing. He’d hunkered down in the basement and worked on the assigned readings for English (just one look at the recent entries wouldn’t hurt), caught up on The Wire, (it might even help him figure out why Betty had been so unlike herself last week), took a long a nap, (they were friends, again, weren’t they?), and made a bold attempt at the essay due next month about local politics (and friends helped friends out, right?). Even the most boring reading about western expansion couldn’t keep the diary from lurking around the corners of his mind. 

Determined to respect his friend’s privacy, Jughead settled down into Mr. Cooper’s recliner and opened up his files on Jason’s death. It wasn’t his place to pry out the information Betty had tried so hard to keep out of the light. Everyone had their secrets in this town, why would she be any different? 

Four thousand, eight hundred, and ninety two written words later Jughead found himself still stuck on just what it was, exactly, that Betty Cooper, Riverdale’s perfect girl next door, had to hide from the world.

It wasn’t until he’d settled in for the night in Betty’s room (the only room he felt comfortable in by himself, so long as he slept above the sheets and didn’t look in any drawers) that the diary became temptation in its most literal form. 

He lay there for hours, tossing and turning as he tried to resist the diary's pull. He counted sheep, recounted lyrics to all of Archie’s pop-laden songs. He even recounted the seven rules of something or another his father was always mumbling about. Jughead had spent the entire day to avoid the damned thing, and now it was taunting him.

Temptation was such an alluring thing. 

Just one page wouldn’t hurt anything, he decided finally. This late at night it seemed easier to agree with all the reasons why he should read it. There was something off about Betty lately. She presented her same facade of sunshine, sparkles, and sprinkles to the rest of the world, the girl who could do no wrong. But ever since summer she’d had a dark undercurrent that bubbled up to the surface, rippling through the image Betty presented to him. It was an undercurrent Jughead recognized in himself, an undercurrent that could drag her under in a second. 

It was darker than anything should exist in someone like Betty.

The first time he’d noticed it was when she thought she’d been alone in the Blue & Gold late one night. Jughead had bunkered down in the corner in the hope that he’d be missed when the janitor did his room checks. Betty hadn’t seen him as she stormed into the room and allowed herself to sink into the pain and fury she’d been bottling up. Mascara ran down her face as angry tears streamed down her face and she muttered to herself. She’d left shortly after composing herself, and Jughead still hadn’t brought it up to her.

The next time was late at night. They were working on boarding the paper and Jughead had suggested moving Cheryl’s article about her now deceased brother to the front page. Without warning, heavy, fat tears began to fall from Betty’s eyes and he held her close, never asking her why she cried. 

The next day they both pretended as if nothing happened, falling back into their safe, prescribed patterns. Him with the outcasts, her with the overachievers. 

And yet, that undercurrent had only grown over time. When certain subjects came up, Betty was short with her words and snapped at people before she could catch herself. It had driven her so-called friends away, but it had only drawn Jughead closer to her. He was curious whether she was the same as he was. If she was also fighting to keep her head above the undertow.

With only moonlight to guide him, it didn’t take long to find the diary where he’d left it, shoved between the mattress and the wall. He turned it over in his hands, giving himself one last chance to do the right thing. One last chance to preserve the trust Betty had unknowingly put in him. His mind made up, he took the diary downstairs to the basement, the only room in the house without windows facing the street.

Jughead clicked on the floor lamp and settled into the armchair.  Eagerly he opened the book to a page near the middle, assuming this would put him somewhere near the Fourth of July, when Archie and Veronica had finally made their relationship official.  

Whatever teenage angst he’d been expecting between those pages was soon forgotten.  The words ‘blood’ and ‘Jason’ and ‘dead’ were the first words to jump out at him.  His heart ramped up and his breath caught.  Jughead had to have read it wrong.  But as his eyes jumped across the page it became clearer what he was reading.  Three more times he read it, each time praying it would be different, and three more times it stayed the same.

Jughead dropped the book to his lap, unable to comprehend what he’d just read. Cliched as it was, he pinched the webbing between his thumb and palm. His nail bit deep, painful and stinging and sobering. He glanced down at the diary only to find none of the words had changed. None of its proclaimed truths had admitted to a lie.

Breath shallow, he scrubbed his hands down the front of his pants as if to scrape the bloody truth from them. For a wild moment he’d convinced himself the diary was nothing more than a work of fiction, something Betty had written to cope with her sister’s disappearance. Before he could fully finish the thought, he knew it was a lie. The words were too crisp, to detailed to be anything but the truth. While she’d been smart enough to change her handwriting, there were too many hints that Betty was the author. Her overuse of conjunctives. The looped e’s and too closely connected th’s that slipped through. But more than anything else it was her use of rigidly proper grammar and the strict adherence to the oxford comma.

He’d read tens of thousands of Betty’s words over his life. He’d once thought it was a privilege. Now, it was little more than a curse. 

A ball of lead grew in his stomach. Of what Betty might have done afterwards. Of what she might have done before hand. The ball writhed and slithered it’s way up his throat and he couldn’t get a deep breath. Jughead didn’t know if he could ever look her in the eye again if he didn’t read the rest to find out why she’d done it. Because Betty always had a reasoning behind her actions, even if that wasn’t always obvious to him. 

That sense of obligation, that he owed it to Betty to understand her, was odd. He’d violated her trust and was now privy to a truth no one was supposed to know. Perhaps it stemmed from his concern for Betty, that maybe he could help her in some way. More likely it was his morbid curiosity that was pushing him to continue reading. Whatever his reasoning might be, that was something to keep him company when he was biting back the cold and trying to ignore his empty stomach next week. For now, what mattered was the diary itself and _why_.

Resigned, Jughead tucked the diary under his arm and padded upstairs. He’d need more than a few cups of coffee to get through this, and dawn was peeking above the horizon. It was early enough no one could see him, but late enough to let him see what he was doing. He set the diary on the kitchen counter while he set the kettle to boil and measured out the grounds in the pewter french press.

(Because _of course_ the Cooper’s used a french press. It was so disturbingly suburban it was surprising Mrs. Cooper hadn’t gone the extra mile to purchase a stainless steel espresso machine to match. It was a luxury that drew bitter jealously from Jughead, one that he’d likely never be able to afford. Just like he’d never be able to afford tickets to the school dance, or a corsage, or even the courage to ask her on a proper date.)

Jughead bit his lip and glanced back at the diary with the hope it had vanished in thin air. It sat innocently on the counter, waiting for him to pick it up once more. From here it looked like a simple journal or date book. The cover belied no evidence of the pain, the trauma, the horror it contained. It offered no hint of the rage and despair between its pages. His mind ran through what little he’d read and desperately tried to make sense of it.

Betty had always had another level to her. An anger to be tucked away and processed at a later, more appropriate time. The Coopers were never to show anything but happy, agreeable faces in public. It was something that was learned at an early age. When a first-grade Reggie yanked on her ponytail, rubbed dirt into her new dress, tore up her homework, Betty never allowed herself to be anything more than annoyed. Even in high school, she’d never succumbed to any attempts to rile her up, to push her over the edge. Every time Archie, or Jughead, or lately Veronica went to step in, Betty would tell them it wasn’t their problem to fix. That Reggie, or Cheryl, or Chuck wasn’t their problem to fix.

Instead she forgave Reggie every time he pulled her hair, Cheryl every time she was insulted in the school cafeteria, Chuck at Pop’s with milkshake running down her front. 

The perfect image of the perfect Cooper.

The idea of it scared Jughead when he’d first met her. The idea of a five year old who could control themselves so much was antithetical to youth itself, an attempt to stifle and stunt her humanity. And if he were honest, that flat smile terrified him more now. It was the perfect cover, he realized. No one could ever suspect Betty Cooper of violence, not when she never got mad and refused to stand up for herself. No one would believe she could be capable of something so gruesome. 

Jughead reached his hand towards the journal and let his hands brush against the canvas cover. His fingers lingered while a voice warned him it wasn’t too late to back out. To put it back where he’d found it and convince himself it was all a bad dream. 

Behind him, the kettle rattled on the stove. He picked up the diary in one hand and the kettle in the other. Jughead opened it to the first page as he poured the boiling liquid into the glass container. In the top right corner was a date. April 2. Freshman year, seven months ago, back when he was barely talking to anyone, and Polly was still the base of the pyramid for Cheryl’s fear-squad. The page was filled with nothing more than mundane comments about Betty’s crush on Archie, the latest drama at school, the sudden arrival of Veronica Lodge.

Odd that this page felt more voyeuristic than what was to come. 

It wasn’t until he skipped ahead almost twenty pages that he found the beginning of the horrible truth.

Dated June 25, the page outlined Betty’s second week at her internship ( _‘finally able to do more than stand around at the copier all day’, ‘called major donors and secured a five thousand dollar donation!!’_ ). Intent on making a good impression, Betty ignored Polly’s three phone calls and let it go to voicemail. When she listened to the messages at lunch, though - 

_‘I listened to it over and over again. It couldn’t be true,’ Betty wrote. ‘I wished it wasn’t true. But as I listened to her voice, I knew it couldn’t be anything else. She never lied to me, and I knew she wasn’t lying then._ ‘He attacked me, held me down. I didn’t know what to do. He said I made him, that I was a tease, and he said-‘ _I can’t even think about what she said anymore. She was in love with him. She said they were talking about getting married one day. And then he did that to her? He said he loved her. He wanted to take care of her. He promised to stop doing this._

_He’s a monster and someone needs to stop him.’_

Jughead set the book down and cupped his hand around the still steaming glass. He held it there until it started to blister. The water inside continued to darken the longer it was in contact with the coffee grounds. He wondered if it was too heavy handed of an allusion or if he was just sleep-deprived. 

Jason Blossom had never been a saint. He’d been one of Jughead’s worst tormentors, and one of the most well liked kids at school. But to think him capable of rape? That was far too easy. The Blossom’s were used to getting what they wanted. It was almost pathological, really. Once Clifford Blossom had purchased, and two days later condemned, Riverdale’s only coffee shop because they refused to serve him first during the morning rush hours

Once that it was dark enough, Jughead poured his own coffee into a large travel mug. Now that he knew the truth, he knew he had to keep reading. The knowledge of it would change him forever. Would change Betty forever. No, not change, but bring the reality of Betty to the forefront. 

Jughead gathered up his coffee, the box of fruit loops he’d brought with him, and the diary to settle back in the den. As the room around him reddened with the early morning light, he read on as Betty made plans for a trip back to Riverdale, begging pardon from her bosses with the excuse of a family emergency. He could only imagine that they were all to willing to help her in her time of need, as most people were. 

So far, it was nothing out of the ordinary for a teenage girl to have written. Betty’s words were controlled and precise, every word judiciously chosen as if she were writing a newspaper article about just what, exactly, was in the water fountains at school. The unsettled energy crept out among the edges the more he read. Pages were warped in a few spots where liquid had dropped onto it, and it was clear that Betty was writing most of this after the fact.

The further he read the more the little voice inside him panicked. It howled that this way only lead to danger and destruction. This was nothing more than Betty Cooper’s dark attempts at fiction, a way for her to cathartically release all her emotions in a safe way. She’d attempted it, a few times, after all. Haltingly she’d scribbled out a few pages of a dark universe where punishment was served by those who’d been hurt. That the victims were the ones to mete out punishment as they saw fit. Punishment that didn’t require evidentiary standards or statutory limits. 

The voice of reason murmured that Betty Cooper didn’t have thoughts like this.

Jughead never did like the voice of reason.

As he read further, he found that Betty had written, and crossed out, various ways of getting revenge in exacting detail on her plane ride back home. It was here, at the start of the list, that Betty’s handwriting changed, shifted into something almost unrecognizable. The list itself stated out as small, minor things that even Reggie would find lame. As the list grew longer, it grew darker, meaner. More violent. Along the margins Betty had written out her frustrations about what had happened to her sister. 

_‘Mom went to the police after P.’s first suicide attempt, but S. K. was too involved with Blossom money to be of any help. He said there was no evidence, that it was P.’s word against J.’s.’_

In a note under a string of curses scratched out, _‘He hasn’t seen P. He doesn’t know her. She would never lie about something like this.’_

Betty wrote about her parents being hit with a cease and desist letter from some high-priced attorney that threatened they’d be sued for libel if there was a single word written about Jason Blossom. A day later an anonymous letter came in the mail threatening both Betty and Polly. That week Alice was inconsolable while Hal drowned himself in scotch, the threat of a lawsuit a way to drive the Coopers into ruin while the looming specter of physical violence hung about the house for months afterwards.

On June 28, the violent lists stopped and the narrative returned as Betty made plans to return to her internship. By now, Polly had been heavily sedated and was sleeping all the time while her parents refused to talk about what happened. Betty had fled to Pop’s to escape from it all only for Jason and his goonies to make an advance towards her. When she ignored them, Moose leered at her and asked if she was as much of a freak between the sheets as her sister. And Betty challenged Jason to find out. 

_‘I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time. My boldness surprised me most of all, but once I’d begun I found I couldn’t back down. Some part of me must have decided what was to be done. The only missing piece was how. If even once I felt my thoughts wrong, against some moral center of the universe, surely I would have felt it. Now, I can only think the universe was condoning my actions. Why else would it deliver J. to me so neatly, and so timely? A fly in such a carefully planned trap would be useless unless devoured whole.’)_

Jughead had to stop. The walls around him felt too close and the air too stale at just how rational Betty’s words were. His own hands had taken on a pinkish hue as the sun continued to rise and he threw the diary away from him. Overheated, he leapt towards the bathroom. The cold water was a shock against his skin, one that brought with it a strange sort of calm.

When he’d first heard the news of Jason Blossom’s death it seemed he was the only one in town happy about it. While the whole town grieved, Jughead felt only relief that maybe he’d make it a few months before the football team remembered him. 

His reflection came into razor sharp focus around him as he realized just how deeply he’d fallen down the rabbit hole of the diary. The knowledge that Betty, his Betty, had contemplated killing Jason Blossom should have been horrifying to him. It should have been a travesty against nature, one he should report. He’d always known his sense of morality was skewed, but he couldn’t help but cheer her on for what she’d done.

Because no matter what had happened to Jason, worse still was what had happened to Polly. The details had been hard for him to read, and several times Jughead had to set the book down before the horror of it consumed him. He gripped the porcelain sink hard enough for his fingers to lose circulation. What he’d read, what Betty had written was the sanitized version. It was only what Polly had felt comfortable with Betty knowing. It was only what Betty had felt comfortable writing. 

That that had been done to Polly with such malice, that Jason had felt no remorse, had threatened Polly and her family, that he’d had such little respect for Polly. Once more Jughead could only be thankful that Jason Blossom was dead and gone, even if no one else found out who he’d really was. 

It wasn’t until July 1, when Betty was firmly entrenched in her internship that the worst news came. 

_‘P. tried it again. And this time she almost succeeded. Dad found her in the bathtub, unresponsive. They took P. away to a facility, and I demanded to come home. Mom and Dad said not to worry, that there was nothing to be done but wait.’_

Worry consumed Betty enough that she managed to get a plane ticket back to Centerdale airport without anyone knowing. From there she managed to hitch her way back home late on July 3rd, only to find the house empty. As she waited, there was a knock on the door and behind it, Jason Blossom armed with flowers and a sheepish smile. 

_‘He asked were P. was so sincerely it was easy enough to see why he’d fooled S.K. His words only turned my resolve into steel. Something in me was repulsed by him, by his very existence, and it was difficult not to throw up at the sight of him. He didn’t deserve to live while Polly wanted to die.  
It was all too easy to invite him in, to make him cocoa and have him believing I wanted him. We agreed to meet at the River in the morning. From there -‘_

The details that followed were sparse, but it was easy enough to piece together from the news articles that had been published. It was here that he’d begun to read, and the words ‘Jason,’ ‘blood’, and ‘dead’ still sat on the page in stark black ink. A dark brown stain was in the bottom corner, one he hadn’t noticed before. 

Jughead screwed his eyes shut and turned the page. With a deep breath, he looked at what lay before him. Jason Blossom's obituary had been neatly pasted on the left page, his red hair and bright blue eyes standing out against the black and white newsprint below. On the page across from it was was a list of names, those Jughead recognized, and didn’t care for, and those he didn’t know. At the top, Chuck and Moose’s names were crossed out neatly, the date of their death written next to it, and their obituary’s had been pasted to the following pages. There were a few paragraphs under each detailing how, and more importantly, why, they’d been killed. 

Numb and empty, Jughead stood and walked up the stairs. It didn’t matter anymore if someone saw him, if someone called Mr. or Mrs. Cooper to report a burglar. With all the care in the world, Jughead put the diary back where he’d found it and sat down on the ground. The sun arced over the Cooper house as new snow began to tap against the window. Next door, a car door slammed as Mrs. Andrews and Archie returned home. The shadows around Jughead grew longer and darker until they vanished into the shadows of the night.

Betty Cooper, he thought, was a murderer. She’d killed Jason Blossom, Moose Mason, and Chuck Clayton. And if she wasn’t stopped, she’d kill at least another five times. 

It should have scared him. It should have driven him to talk to her, to plead with her to stop. That this wasn’t right. That these boys should be judged under the law. That she shouldn’t have to take justice into her own hands.

"Betty Cooper is a serial killer." His soft words fell around him. Laughter bubbled up in his throat, loud and harsh against the quiet. His stomach hurt from laughing so hard, his throat tightening around the sound to keep him from drawing a full breath.

His best friend was a murderer. And Jughead Jones was going to make sure she got away with it.


End file.
